***
The following is a chunk from the Epilogue of my dissertation. In a moment of poetic justice
I am cannibalizing it into a sharper reflective section. Who wants to do
readings in their conclusion anyway? This was largely influenced by Andrew
Hoberek’s excellent review of Whitehead’s zombie novel (the full citation
appears in my citations). So if you’re looking for a place to dig into that
novel, I would start there. ***

With three long chapters titled “Friday,”
“Saturday,” and “Sunday,” Zone One
describes the passing of three days in the titular segment of Manhattan. The
protagonist Mark Spitz is part of Omega Unit, and along with the gaunt Gary and
the ever-practical unit leader Kaitlyn he moves up and down office towers and
apartment blocks searching for any remaining “skels” or “stragglers.”[i]
Skels resemble a typical zombie—hungry for human flesh, in a state of
decomposition, more dangerous in groups, and vicious—the stragglers, less so.
The latter are Whitehead’s contribution to the zombie plot: stragglers just
stand or sit or lie and stare. They are skels that have thoroughly checked out;
they often return to a fixed place, perhaps still meaningful to some recess of
muscle or blood memory, and just wait. Omega unit’s mission is straightforward:
clear each room, dispatch any skel found there, and record everything. However
clear the plot is, the story must be pieced together through the regular
digressions of the third person limited narrator, who fills the reader in on
Mark Spitz’s story from the time of the ruin through to the present. The
narrator’s dislocation and overlap with Mark Spitz dislodges a similar
correspondence in earlier post-apocalyptic novels, from Stewart’s Earth Abides to Brin’s The Postman. There is no ruse of history
here, instead Mark Spitz’s mediocrity, rather than his exceptionalism, is the
root cause of his survival and the basis for his radical anti-post-apocalyptic
decision at the end of the novel.

The narrator’s digressions cannot quite
be characterized as flashbacks, but they are motivated by Mark Spitz’s
memories. The narrator describes him as a “thorough, inveterate B,” while, in
his review of the novel, Andrew Hoberek calls Mark Spitz “the modernist
antihero cum superhero,” whose power of mediocrity “renders him perfectly
suited to the post-Last Night world. Or so the narration, so finely calibrated
that his thoughts blend seamlessly with those of the narrator, insists.”[ii]
Similar to the way memory functions in The
Road, this blending of memory and reflection maps the novel’s
post-apocalyptic present through the affective attachment Mark Spitz maintains
with the past. Unlike the way McCarthy’s novel maintained a distinct
sparseness, Whitehead’s novel draws on popular and mass culture to fill in the
gaps in the narrative. For instance, Mark Spitz identifies a skel in the first
group he encounters as reminiscent of an old grade school teacher who had a
hairdo called “a Marge, after Marge Halstead, the charmingly klutzy actress
who’d trademarked it in the old days of red carpets and flirty tete-a-tetes on
late-night chat shows.”[iii]
This kind of reference shuffles the typical trope of zombie stories—rather than
having to kill his friends (i.e. “I had to kill her, she was going to turn”) he
dispatches unknowns but only after assigning them affective weight from his
memory. But, memory in the novel does not only originate from within the
individual; instead, the city itself seems to be able to project something
resembling a memory.

In an incredible passage from early in
the novel, the city becomes the subject, deindividuating any of its particular
denizens and reframing the apocalyptic event of the novel as another in a long
line of reformations and reshapings that have changed the composition of
Manhattan. Mark Spitz used to visit his uncle there. He would stare and look
out the window at the city:

He remembered how things used to be, the customs of
the skyline. Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated
runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another’s shadows.
Inevitability was mayor, term after term, yesterday’s old masters, stately
named and midwife by once-famous architects, were insulted by the soot of
combustion engines and by technological advances in construction. Time chiseled
at elegant stonework, which swirled or plummeted to the sidewalk in dust and
chips and chunks. Behind the façades their insides were butchered reconfigured,
rewired according to the next era’s new theories of utility. Classic six into
honeycomb, sweatshop killing floor into cordoned cubical mill. In every
neighbourhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and
their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel
into steel. The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of the
rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained the same
and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn’t anyplace else. It was New York
City.[iv]

Everything
is here: the consecration of each age of urban planners and architects by the
previous generation of social planners, the marks left by the smog of
automobile use, the shift from labour heavy industry to the cognitive lightness
of creative industries, and the crash of wave after wave of new immigrants
eager to become “American.” But, for Whitehead, each of these figures becomes a
mere synecdoche, something contained in the still vastness of the New York
skyline as it is surveyed by the mediocre boy in his uncle’s apartment. This
narrated rise and fall of a city echoes what Samuel Zipp has described as Manhattan Projects, those efforts in the
nineteen-sixties to remake the city which allow Zipp to articulate “the rise of
a world city and the decline into urban crisis,”[v] as twin
processes, which, in turn, shapes the moment of Whitehead’s own formation in
the wake of the nineteen-sixties and his response to this formation in Zone One.[vi] The turnover
of New York City from the mid-century to the post-industrial city of tomorrow
in the 1960s and 1970s is a change that Zone
One figures in order to target the contemporary turnover of U.S
hegemony—the places remain the same, and in many cases so do the names, but
everything seems different now. This attempt to come to terms with a new
economic order makes up the backdrop of Mark Spitz movements through the Zone.

Breaking
up the action and mediating activity through memory and recollection, the insistent interruptions of the
narrator demonstrate presumed self-importance through referentiality. As in
other post-apocalyptic novels, the network of relations, now dead, from whom
the protagonists draw sustenance, speak through the narrator, as they cannot
speak in the present. In his review of the book Thomas Jones find this type of digression
to be uninteresting:

The banality of the backstory is part of the
point—Mark Spitz is proudly mediocre and credits his mediocrity as the core
reason for his survival—but compared to a post-apocalyptic novel like Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road, Zone One gives little sense of
what, if anything, has been lost.[vii]

Mark
Spitz is caught between a host of memories and the grim, slow task of combing
nearly every square inch of Manhattan for skels. Through its focus on slow
process, the novel suggests that loss is rarely a punctual event, but occurs
slowly, accreting shape and form until one day it confronts us fully fleshed
out and hungry. For commentators like McGrul, this process of loss registers a “rapid
corrosion even of our secular myths about the self, not least the myth of its
rational autonomy,” which shifts Zone One “not to realism but to the
weirdness of allegory.”[viii]
Not unlike the racialized fears captured by the earlier post-apocalyptic novels
of the long-fifties, Hoberek suggests that Zone One could be read in an
allegorical light “for more specific fears of immigrants, of terrorists, of the
people who want to get into our gated communities.” The post-apocalyptic novel
form that once used to contain and process white racial fears, as in Matheson’s
I am Legend,in the hands of
Whitehead becomes a critical tool to examine the way those anxieties return to
fore after 9/11 and what this might mean for the U.S. in the wake of its
catastrophic bid for hegemony in Iraq.

In the wake of massive crisis, PASD
(Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder), one of the novel’s great innovations, generates a
moment of profound reflection on the cultural function of post-apocalyptic
genre as a whole. Most often used to refer to the still human who cannot seem
to cope in their post-apocalyptic world, the novel plays with the aural
similarity of PASD and past:

Accounting for the trauma of the post-apocalyptic
story world has not been done before in this way. Indeed, that version of skels
known as the straggler even seem to have PASD and simply stop or return to
places of profound meaning from their pre-apocalyptic lives. The novel names
these figures stragglers because they seem to be living in the past. Hoberek neatly
traces this slippage to the way trauma plays across the register of the
individual and the collective, “like
the Last Night story, and like a past more generally, trauma is the thing that
makes everyone at once unique (because everyone’s is different) and the same
(because everyone has one).”[ix]
PASD, thus cuts across identity lines (and even unifies the living and the
undead) to mark a culture that is in deep shock and denial. As
Hoberek has it, “crucially, the moment late in the novel when we find out that
Mark Spitz is black occurs when he is telling Gary his Last Night story, and
Gary—otherwise an encyclopedia of ‘racial, gender, and religious
stereotypes’—fails to recognize the one (black people can't swim) that adds an
additional element of irony to Mark Spitz's nickname.”[x] Thus, Mark
Spitz final decision in Colson Whitehead’s Zone
One (2011), to dive into a mass of zombies, rendered in the novel as a “sea
of the dead,” flags one resolution to the tired march of survival undertaken
time and again in post-apocalyptic novels.[xi] Whitehead’s
novel, which features zombies who have given up, dramatizes a new finale for the familiar narrative
movement of post-apocalyptic novels from destruction to survival. Like the
mother from The Road, in the face of
an eternal return to the same, Mark Spitz decides to give up. So even though
“Now the world was muck,” the narrator still suggests that “systems die
hard—they outlive their creators and unlike plagues do not require individual
hosts—and thus it was a well-organized muck with a hierarchy, accountability and,
increasingly, paperwork.”[xii]
Rather than read Mark Spitz’s decisions to embrace the mass as a discreet act
within a novel, what seems striking about his decision is that it flies in the
face of the genre as whole. His gruesome decision to “learn how to swim” shakes
the foundation of both the repetition compulsion and the focus on the
individual demonstrably found in the post-apocalyptic. But, eliminating the
focal character does not eliminate the post-apocalyptic scenario it only undoes
our access to it.

The
long architectural passage I quoted above gains new significance in light of
the close of the novel. Whitehead may be narrating the changing urban plan of
the city, the social relations that undergird it and shore it up, but in
providing a theory of the urban metabolism he also gestures to a deeper
connection between the form and content of the post-apocalyptic novel itself.
If anything, the allegorical slippage of Whitehead’s narration makes up an
informal history of formal change that is not strictly limited to the city at
all, but can be read as a metahistory of the post-apocalyptic novel: “Up and
down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through
verticality and ambition, sulked in one another’s shadows.” The effects wrought
by the writers taking on their visions of after
the end are replaced or one-upped as “Time chiseled at elegant stonework,
which swirled or plummeted to the sidewalk in dust and chips and chunks.” It
wasn’t New York City after all it was a zombie novel.

NOTES

[i] As
Thomas Jones points out, the name Omega Unit is “a nod to the 1971 movie The
Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, one of the many adaptations of Robert
Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, also a major influence onNight
of the Living Dead.” Thomas
Jones, “Les Zombies C’est Vous,” in The
London Review of Books 34.2 (26 January 2012), 27.

[v] Samuel
Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and
Fall of Urban Renewal in New York (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 29.

[vi]
Hoberek’s review is one again instructive for me here: Whitehead “presents New
York as an imagistic assemblage of scenes glimpsed through windows: the curator
is none other than the author himself. Here we see a profound difference
between Whitehead's approach to his genre materials and that of, say, Junot
Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Both Whitehead (b. 1969)
and Diaz (b. 1968) belong to a generational cohort of mostly male American
authors—Michael Chabon (b. 1963) and Jonathan Lethem (b. 1964) are others—who
embrace the genre forms of their youths. But whereas Diaz, in Wao, turns
to the clunky, semi-Victorian diction of comic books, science fiction, and
fantasy as a way beyond the minimalist, Carveresque prose of his first book. Drown
(1996), Whitehead tells his zombie story in highly polished, formally
perfect prose.” Hoberek, “PASD,”
409.